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Comment

Paid endorsement? Maybe someone from the Blender project bought him a beer.

Disclaimer: this is just a hobby of mine.

I use Blender a lot. I don't know how to use most of the features it offers, but I do use it for:

Creating 3D models

Texturing

Rigging

Animation

It's also integrated pretty well with Ogre3D with the blender2ogre plugin. You can use this to export your mesh's to Ogre (another tool on Ryan's list) and preview the mesh's in OgreMeshy to make sure the mesh, its texture, and animations looks okay before you put it in your application.

You can also preview your scene in Tundra (which also uses Ogre). You can preview your mesh just like in OgreMeshy, but you can also simulate physics. This should be pretty good for testing scenes in a video game.

I've had some problems with the exporter and had to edit a couple lines in the script to get everything working correctly. Other than that, I think using Blender to create Ogre3D applications is a pretty good solution.

Comment

I'm sure they'll fix that (soon|eventually). We went through this with SSE and other opcodes, too. They're usually pretty good about this once people start hitting it. When you can run it, you'll be surprised by the things Valgrind can dig up for you.

--ryan.

One would think it would have been fixed by now. The upstream bug has *260* votes and was reported in May of last year, but there haven't been any updates to the SVN branch since last October.

Comment

Also, out of curiosity, why is Open Dynamics Engine on the list, but not Bullet?

i agree, why not bullet? don't get me wrong, ode is great and has some advantages over bullet, chief among them would probably be its ease of use and integration into a project, but bullet is a far more advanced physics engine these days. bullet is actively maintained and developed, and it's gjk and epa implementations are robust and mature. ode recently saw a new release after several years but it's mostly maintenance work, although the new collision system offered by libccd is a step in the right direction. hopefully exploiting temporal coherence (for detection, contact generation, and warm starting the solver) isn't far off.

Comment

Also, out of curiosity, why is Open Dynamics Engine on the list, but not Bullet?

i agree, why not bullet? don't get me wrong, ode is great and has some advantages over bullet, chief among them would probably be its ease of both use and integration into a project, but bullet is a far more advanced physics engine these days. bullet is actively maintained and developed, and it's gjk and epa implementations are robust and mature. ode recently saw a new release (its first new release in years) but it's mostly just maintenance work, although the new collision system offered by libccd is a step in the right direction. hopefully development will continue to advance for ode and exploiting temporal coherence (for detection, contact generation, and warm starting the solver), which imo is a big missing feature from ode, won't be too far off now. (CCD is probably the biggest missing feature, but baby steps..)

Comment

Thanks for the links. Though, looks many of them are simply public domain replacements for better known libraries (zlib, libpng, freetype). Are there really places where you can't reasonably use zlib-licensed code?